The Churchills are trying to let go of dairying

I went to Thelma's this morning and during the usual conversation, she said "Your neighbors are selling their cows."

Oh my.  I'm not surprised I didn't know.  Vermonters are generous with information if you ask a question (many jokes notwithstanding), but are reluctant to talk about themselves to anyone they haven't known for more years than I've lived there. Nonetheless, I stopped at the house late this afternoon. Lori answered the door and I asked if I could ask about what I'd heard, that they were selling the cows. And they are.

A lot of it is about the price of milk.  But most of it is about the work, and the work to keep dairy cows going is huge. You want to minimize how much grain you feed cows, because you can't grow the grain yourself.  What you can grow is your own hay or corn, and the hay work (after you wait out the rain and get three days of warm sun) is exhausting. Hours on the tractor, mowing.  Hours on the tractor, chopping, or tetting and raking.  Hours on the baler, and all of this is in hayfields that aren't all that far away, but are by no means next to the house.  And loading the hay into the hay barn and getting it stacked up.

 Then there are the barn chores. Cows don't care how dirty they get, and udders have to be cleaned prior to milking. Milking machines are heavy. The person doing the milking is bending over all the time.  The milk parlor has to be cleaned top to bottom after each milking. And the hay has to be fed out, and the barn mucked out (horses are a piece of cake compared to cows). And equipment repaired. And cows aren't very trainable.  Docile, yes.  Trainable, no.  If you have to doctor a cow, you're wrestling with her. Ray and Lori have a hired man, who works hard, but he's no spring chicken, and for the last few years his job has been to manage the milk room and the cows in the barn.  Everything else is pretty much up to Ray and his son-in-law Paul.

A farmer stops dairying because of injury in a farm accident, or because the farmer wears out, and that's what's happened to Ray.  His back is gone.  He had some discs fused in 2001, and that gave him relief for a while, but the farm work started undoing that result about 3 years ago.  Ray can't stand up for more than about 15 minutes without leaning on something. He's in constant pain again. The pain and the work mean that he's running on empty all the time.

This is a business and continuing-health decision, but it comes at a great emotional cost.  Ray and Lori were high school sweethearts, and both are from dairy families.  For Ray to give up dairying changes the course of their family's histories. 

But there's a herd history that will end too.  Ray and Lori's herd started with Ray's first cow, Candy.  Starting when Ray was a Junior Showman, Candy took blue ribbons at Tunbridge Fair for a number of years.  Many of the current cows are descendents and grand-descendents of Candy.  The cows are very much their own family, not patched together from an auction here and an auction there.  And they're part of the Churchill family. 

26 cows are sold, and Ray and Lori are trying to seal the deal on 25 more.  They're relieved that the 26 have gone to a young woman in New Hampshire with a degree in dairy management, who loves the Jersey cow, loved Ray's cows, and paid him "the right price".  They will be her foundation herd, not just 26 more in a monster herd, so they've gone to a good home.  Even so, Lori is taking this hard, because the breakup of families is hard to deal with, even though the decision makes very good sense if Ray is to keep his health.

It's hard to think of not seeing Jersey cows in those fields, and next to my house. Several years ago another local farmer gave up dairying because his back gave out, and he says that decision has kept him out of a wheelchair. I think Ray sees that wheelchair rolling toward him.

Ray and Lori would like to keep a small herd of 16-20.  They have private milk customers that they'd like to keep.  Ray says he can do the haying, but Paul really does not like the milking part of farming (although he will do it). Ray's daughter Brenda has a full-time job, so she can't take the milking over.  Lori  doesn't do milking, and I'm sure there's a good reason, because she isn't a slacker. They are going to try the small herd until the fall of next year, and then decide what to do.  Paul would like to run beef cattle, and there is a growing market for local beef. 

Farming is gratifying to those who do it successfully, but it is difficult beyond words. However long and however well you farm, the work, day after day after day, never stops. And it wears you out.